


The times were grand in size and we were small

by Zara Hemla (zarahemla)



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-04
Updated: 2016-07-04
Packaged: 2018-07-20 03:03:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7387999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zarahemla/pseuds/Zara%20Hemla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>By dark, she was almost out of curses.</p><p>(Set before the series.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	The times were grand in size and we were small

**Author's Note:**

> A million trillion bazillion thanks to JET, who let me coax her out of retirement, helped me make a real fic out of these strung-together words, and vanished back into the night like Daredevil. You rock my socks! Mwah!

[...] and  
a woman whispering to a man  
over and over _what else could we have done_?  
\--Eavan Boland

 

The winter wind shifted direction suddenly, whistling over the cemetery's grave markers and whipping Fiona's hair into her face. She muttered, stomped her feet in her stupid impractical boots, and huddled closer into her overcoat. In the graveyard, no light penetrated from the street, and the only noise was the wind and the gate banging against its posts. Fiona cursed, spitting hair out of her mouth. "Sean. . . ." she said warningly to no one. "You bloody great idiot!" 

* * *

She had spent the last two months in godforsaken Wexford, living in the spare room of a man old enough to have fought in the Great War. Wife dead thirty years, 'twas just he and the dog left, and the dog was healthier than he was. Yet he knew a great deal about chemical explosives, and had been willing to teach her all his secrets, for a fee. 

Her IRA contact, Adina, had told Fiona that there wasn't anyone left in the army that could teach her anything. In the past half-decade, she had learned every rifle and gun spec that she could get her hands on, poring over diagrams with parts lists, shot distances, and ammunition sizes until her eyes crossed. Then she had moved to bigger diagrams: SAMs, grenade launchers, truck-mounted guns, and bombs. She had a particular genius for constructing (and deconstructing) bombs, which she supposed was what got noticed. Many bomb squaddies had learned to their detriment that someone else’s bomb usually had some kind of trap or tic that ended up in a loss of fingers, arms, or worse. But Fiona, moving gently and carefully, could coax a bomb into opening up and spilling its guts like a man complaining about his mother-in-law.

"You soaked it all up like a sponge, didn't you? Done pretty well, for a girl who never finished school." Adina was laughing as she said it, which took the sting out of the words.

"I had other things on my mind," said Fiona with dignity. _Like my dead sister; my mother sobbing into a pillow every night; like ceasefires that didn’t stop the snipers or the tanks. Like how I could get attached to a dying cause and do damage, even though I had no idea what the damage would do to me, to the people around me._

"That you did, girl. And so it's like we're sending you on from the piano teacher, to the symphony. Get it?" Adina was stocky, white-haired, and had seven grandchildren. Fiona had personally seen her put a bullet through four candle flames, one after the other, from across the room. "You're going to be our first chair of explosions. Good Irish music, that is." 

Adina had lost a son in the early part of the Troubles, and was as passionate as any man alive about Irish independence. Fiona half expected her to break into a chorus of "Amhrán na bhFiann," as she did sometimes, but she spared Fiona and just gave her a hug and fifty pounds and told her to be good and not take any sexist shite from the old man if he shouldn't keep his hands to himself. A depressing prospect, but one they both had to live with.

So off Fiona had gone, on the bus past farmland and sheep grazing and business park, further south than she had ever been in her own country. She leaned her head on the cold window glass and wondered where she would be if Claire had lived. University? Travel? Marriage to some nice Catholic boy that her mother picked out? White flowers, a white dress, a quiet life . . . instead of indentured servitude to a cause that she had long since stopped being a spiritual part of. Her body still followed orders; her fingers still worked on wiring and sorting; and her mouth said the right slogans. And here she was taking the IRA’s blood money to further her own education. Well. Fiona considered that a trade – the grand Troubles stole Claire’s life, and exploited Fiona’s own youthful zeal, feeding her a line of swill about equality and freedom. Presently, Fiona cared about one thing: the placement of the detonator. The wires, just so; the bang, on time.

When she arrived in Wexford with all her thoughts, the old gaffer really had taken her in, without a single comment on her sex, and taught her technique: how to have her own style but not make it a signature. Police often could track bombers by signature wiring, and it led to dossiers and attention and arrests. Better to be a shadow, which was something she had decided on years ago. 

She also cleaned the cottage top to bottom, washed the dog, and shoveled snow when necessary. And she learned to combine household cleaners, and how much det cord a person needed to cut a shaped hole in a wall, and how to balance real chemicals like mercury fulminate delicately so that things would go boom in a big way. How to finesse a block of C4 into doing exactly what she wanted, so that if she had the time, she could write Claire's name in letters of fire.

Time passed quickly, because she loved learning her lessons, but she felt uneasy all the same. In Wexford, all the Dublin problems seemed so far away. Country life was slow and the old men would gather in the yard to dig up old reminiscences, often living in the past all afternoon until Fiona was forced to bring them out a meal so they wouldn’t starve. She didn’t have to worry about Sean pressuring her to ‘join the family business,’i.e., gunrunning. She didn’t have to think about her own unfitness to be anything other than a murderer of civilians. 

Fiona had learned in her years with the IRA that no one who burned for the Cause (or the money that came in to the Cause) really cared about collateral damage. Ulstermen, Irishmen, Provos or RUC or British Army: everyone just shrugged and threw up their hands when a Claire died, or a housewife was beaten to death, or a child died under a tank's wheels. Fiona did not think herself any different. She had killed for the IRA, shot for them, distracted for them, robbed banks for them, driven for them, blown up buildings for them. At first she had been doing it for revenge, then because she was good at it: increasingly, she was not sure what else she could do. Where else she could go. What else she was good at. Who else would want her and her black soul anywhere near them.

* * * 

Fast-forward eight long weeks, and there was Sean ringing up to ask if she would get her arse back to Dublin to help him with ‘something’ (so much for staying out of family business). Ever cagey, Sean wouldn't talk on the phone about it. "Glencullen cemetery," was all he would say. 

And so she gave the old gaffer a hug and a talking-to about hygiene and how his wife, God rest her soul, would not like the condition his kitchen was in, and back on the bus she went, head full of wiring and diagrams and chemicals, bouncing over ruts in the road while remembering that sulfuric acid will react with aluminum foil to produce aluminum sulfate and hydrogen gas. She limped from the bus stop to the cemetery with her bag, in her boots that she had stupidly bought with the heels on them because she was tired of Sean's jokes about her being short. After a while, it felt like her numb feet were awash in slush, which made the curses on Sean and his idiocy come thick and fast. By dark, she was almost out of curses. 

As the bell in the chapel tolled one in the morning, she lit a fag to keep herself company, then saw the headlights coming up the road and quickly stubbed it out. When the car stopped she saw Sean get out with two other men she didn't recognize, but that was par for the course. Sean never travelled alone anymore, and hadn't for many years. As a notorious gunrunner and man wanted by the British government, he was justifiably paranoid. He looked paranoid now: paranoid and shifty and tired and happy, like always when he was in the middle of dirty deeds.

"Little sister!" said Sean. He always said that because he knew she hated it. He frowned as he saw her new muffler. “Really, Fiona?”

“Wexford Youths,” she said. Since she had bought it a) because it was pink, but b) expressly to annoy Sean, she was quite pleased at the look on his face. 

“You’ve gone bloody native on us,” Sean groused. He professed to be a Bray man, and indeed wore the team’s muffler tucked into his black overcoat, but everyone knew that he wore it because the green stripes looked best with his eyes. Behind him, the two security men fanned out into the cemetery. The headlights on the car went out once more, plunging everything back into darkness. 

"And how was the arse end of Wexford?"

"Brilliant. Keep a lookout under your bed, old son. You never know what you'll find." Which made Sean laugh, and hug her, and pick her up, and ignore her squirming and her yelling, and put her down when he was good and ready.

“Damn it, Sean! I'm cold and tired, and I still don't know what the hell I'm even doing here!"

"Straighten out your knickers. You're here to look at some merchandise and make sure it's got all its pins and screws and what-the-hell-ever."

"What. Bloody. Merchandise?" said Fiona with exasperation. 

"Ach, I can't remember all the details. Guns! Big guns. And a, a what d'ya call it?" He snapped his fingers. "McBride. What's it again?"

"Strela-3," said a voice out of the darkness, close enough to her left ear to make her whip her head around. She could barely make out the shape of one of Sean’s security men moving past her, a broad black shadow with gravel crunching beneath his boots. Then the words registered.

"Are you bloody serious?" she hissed. "That's a bloody missile launcher!"

"Dead right!" said Sean, sounding a little too happy about it. "Russian, I do believe. Cost me a pretty shilling." From the road came a low rumble as a truck made its way to the gates of the cemetery. One of the men reached into Sean's car and flashed the lights, and the truck slowly breached the gate and stopped a few meters away. Two men exited the truck, leaving one in still behind the wheel. 

“How do, boys!” shouted the larger man. The other, probably another of the surfeit of security men at this bloody transaction, stood by the truck’s door with a machine pistol ( _Uzi_ , said Fiona’s brain catalog) held loosely in his hands. 

"Sean!" she hissed again. "What are you even going to bloody do with a surface-to-air missile?"

"Anything I want, girl!" Sean practically waltzed toward the truck, whistling "Melt With You." Fiona tried to take one step after him and her frozen feet would not cooperate. She stumbled forward and fell with an undignified squeak, but did not hit the ground. Gravel spit again, and Sean’s security man – McBride? – shot forward and stopped her with his body. She felt the huff of his breath in her hair as she hit him full force, knees to shoulders, and the “Eh, lass” that he said, almost a whisper, as his other arm went around her to keep them both from falling.

"Um," said Fiona, not knowing what to do next. _And fuck your ‘lass,’_ she thought but did not say. He was warm through her jacket. He set her on her feet and turned her back toward the truck, so quickly and quietly that no one even seemed to notice her slip. As she took another step, she realized that she still could not stay upright and grabbed him by the arm. She felt leather under her hand, and it was warm too. "It's my boots," she said impatiently. 

He did not reply, but paced her past the quiet man with the Uzi, and around the back side of the truck. As her feet gained circulation again, she let go of him and moved into the small circle of light cast by Sean holding a torch. He helped her inside and began shining the torch into the crates. Most of the guns were Kalashnikovs, virtually indestructible, the stolid soldier of the gun world, always ready to fire. There were a bucketload of Berettas and even a small wooden box packed with brown glass bottles of nitrobenzene, which, if they didn't break during transport and suffocate everyone, Fiona might 'borrow' for her own purposes. She was quite sure that Sean had no idea how to use it, and there had once been a beautiful old-timey bomb called a rackarock that they used to blow up tunnels back in the last century. It used nitrobenzene. If she put a few together and sold them. . . .

She did not finish the thought because Sean opened up another crate and there was the Strela-3, which, she had to say, was pretty fuckin' beautiful, from the end of the missile's delicate tail fin to the rounded glass lens of the seeker apparatus on the launch tube. Fiona took the torch from Sean and began checking the whole thing over. "Battery, yes," she muttered to herself. "Supply, gyros, tracker, trigger, yes. Fins, forward and rear, yes. Reticle, sustainer motor, IR head, yes." She gave the torch back to Sean, looking up at him. "It's got all its parts," she said bluntly. "But without using it, you won't know whether it works or not." 

"Can we put it together here?" asked Sean.

"Jesus! No!"

"Well," said Sean. He stood up, bounded down from the truck, then held his arms up. "Come on, itty bit." Fiona sighed and dropped herself into his arms. "Good girl," he said, hugging her again. "Take your tiny arse over to the car while I negotiate payment." 

"Negotiate?!" said the large man that Fiona assumed was the seller of that fine piece of machinery. "You didn't say anythin' about negotiatin'!"

"It's been pointed out to me, that I don't know if it works," said Sean reasonably.

Fiona, at that point having lost interest, went and retrieved her bag and picked her way to the car. She decided that the passenger seat was good enough for her, and sat down in it with a deep sigh. With the door still open, and the wind still whistling past her, she dug out her packet of fags and lit up. In the chapel, the deep bell tolled twice. When Sean got back to the car, she was half asleep and barely registered someone tucking her feet into the car, putting her seat belt across her, and closing the door. Sean started the car and swung past the cemetery gates, and she woke up enough to say, "Did you pay him?"

"Half now, half later," said Sean. "If the bloody thing works."

"Good idea," she said, sinking back into sleep as Sean said, "It was McBride's."

\--end--

**Author's Note:**

> note: title and epigraph from "Domestic Violence" by Eavan Boland.


End file.
